First, what you want to document: date of conception and trail of diligence toward reduction to practice. If the diligence in reducing your concept to practice is unbroken (at least not unreasonably broken -- you're allow bathroom breaks and even vacations and sick time), your invention date can extend back to the date of conception. Otherwise, it's the date of first reduction to practice. If your patent application is "enabling", that's "constructive" reduction to practice -- meaning effectively reduction to practice.
If your code worked, that's arguably reduction to practice and thus "invention". The challenge is documenting the date.
Second, how do you authenticate the date? Common practice is to have your cubicle neighbor witness (and sign) your log book. It's not absolutely necessary, but usually sufficient. If ever called to testify, you can authenticate the dates yourself on the witness stand. Of course, that appears self-serving and may not be persuasive, but it's not a fatal flaw to rely on such testimony.
Testimony that could help would be to swear that your computer's clock is synchronized routinely with a time server and the date stamps on the electronic files have not been tampered with. Of course that reminds me of a scene in a movie -- "Strange Brew". The witness blurts out spontaneously that he'd like to add that the time codes are very hard to fake. "What do you mean by that?" ... pause ... "Just because I don't know what I'm talking about doesn't mean that I'm lying."
Of course, a nice service to have would be a digital (cryptographic) signature of a trusted third party time server to authenticate dates/times. I wonder if that sort of thing exists already.
So, let's say you're concern about the inadequacy of your documentation to date and you want to back-fill now with better documentation. I'd suggest that it's more persuasive if you document those dates as best you can now rather than in court when you have a specific prior art date you're trying to get behind. Without a specific target date in mind, your recollections now may be perceived as less biased as a result. In addition, your recollections now are probably more trustworthy than recollections a few years from now. To the extent you can collect corraborating evidence of the time line you remember, that would be helpful.
In short, your own testimony might be sufficient, but anything you can do to corraborate your recollection would be helpful. And, documenting all this now rather than later is not a bad idea.
Regards.
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Topic: inventors log book need help (Read 1118 times)
